Companies, such as those of the music or sports industry, have become challenged in how to monetize their products and brands in the face of disruption to distribution, e-commerce, retail and user consumption models. For example, the music industry is disrupted by combined aggregators, distributors and consumption points, e.g., iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc. Fans enjoy more choice, access, and cost control than ever. Increasingly, fans leverage other fans within socially connected crowd-sourced environments to discover, consume, and share music content. Labels' and artists' attempts to connect with fans via existing social media remain one way and non-interactive. The critical role of live performances, tours, and personal events is under-leveraged by artists and labels in driving the required incremental revenue to offset the loss of margin ceded to the digital product aggregators/distributors.
Additionally, a great diversity of interests separate the disparate mix of stakeholders within top levels of professional sports, where, arguably, the core product all sports stakeholder share are the players. These interests are not fully satisfied with conventional systems and schemes for monetizing distributed digital content, products, and branded experiences.
Moreover, brands, especially consumer products brands, show increasingly diminished returns on their digital advertising investments due to low quality inventory and lack of penetration into emerging social networks. Consumer product brands seek more efficient and scalable means for their advertising investment when consumers are increasingly non-receptive or blind to traditional and current digital advertising media.